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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Something we (people who work in tech) should be acutely aware of is causing unnecessary distractions from important issues. When there's a discussion about the Google very often the first few comments are about how some other tech company also does something unsavory. This is a thread about how Google's engineers are actively working to take over the web as we know it and become the gatekeepers to all the benefit (not to mention profit) the web has to offer, and now the top comment isn't about what Google are doing.

While your point is valid and reasonable in it's own right, posting it in a discussion about Google isn't really the right place.

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Worth noting that all sorts of entities employ people to do PR on internet forums, and redirecting and deflecting is a crucial part of their tactics.

Not saying that this is happening here, but forums need to be resilent and really focus hard on the issue at hand or be completely played by the professionals.

They don't need to be so Machiavellian. This forum is filled with Google and Facebook engineers. Some of them sincerely don't see anything bad in their companies. Others probably want to protect their stock options.

I am always amazed that being negative about Amazon is stomped out quickly in general. Just my experience where I wonder if this is by a team or they just have a lot fans.

Probably fans. It’s not easy to get support against Amazon when they are still delivering the majority of people‘a packages.

I don't think we need to be that charitable. Seems well in line with the Amazon ethos to proactively control the narrative around them in online discussions.

"It's impossible to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." - Mencken

> - Mencken

Rabbit hole[1] successfully descended and eventually escaped. Luckily it was a very shallow one. :)

1: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

It's really impressive how quickly how posts that criticize Google and Facebook are downvoted.

I think a lot of the time this is because people aren't careful about thinking through their additional criticisms and rely on their general feeling of "I'm upset with X and this appears bad on the surface" to suffice. When people call out the obvious faults with the argument, people take it as defending the company rather than pointing out faulty assumptions (probably both).

A simple example of this is 'Google abandons products.' it's been more and less teue at different times, but it's almost always presented as a truism when the reality is more nuanced, and depends on a bunch of factors (is it a paid product, is it out of beta, do they publish a support lifetime, etc.) Google do seem to abandon a lot of stuff, but they also have a lot of stuff which can skew perceptions if you are mostly aware of certain products, and they seem to follow a sort of consistency as to how likely they are to persist.

An overly broad assertion about Google abandoning products may be met with responses like thus, even if the people responding agree that Google does it more than others. That's not defending Google because it's Google, it's adding nuance to a discussion (there are of course just defenders).

Note: I'm not trying to argue this Google criticism, it's used as an example. Even if you think this is a bad example because that's not how you see this argument usually played out, it's probably more constructive to discuss communication strategies and misunderstandings than to rehash a very played out Google criticism here more than I've done.

For me, these submissions are interesting because they surface concerns that my admittedly atypical day to day behaviors shelter me from. For instance, it takes a bit of effort to remember that for some the Facebook app is the internet, and it might be hard to understand the difference between ads and organic search results.

Ultimately though, how I engage with comments is going to be a product of my biases and opinions as an informed technical person, which in cases like this might lend support to countervailing points despite the fact that I find the primary content valuable.

I also find that I'll very frequently close the top couple of comments to look for other perspectives. That approach seems sufficient this this case.

This is outside of my area of expertise, but I wonder whether it'd be possible to train machine learning models to identify divergent threads of conversation.

Tangential conversation can be useful and constructive sometimes; but other times it'd be nice to apply a contextual overlay to a conversation which emboldens the on-topic discussion items and de-prioritizes side discussions.

It's possible to argue that that's what the HN community itself should do naturally via upvote/downvote behaviour -- but in practice there are various (often valid) reasons why an unrelated thread of commentary can become more popular than on-topic discussion.

It’s much easier to train a globally distributed English speaking workforce to do this for very cheap.

I see this claim often and while I don't deny its possibility I have yet to see any evidence to substantiate it.

> I see this claim often and while I don't deny its possibility I have yet to see any evidence to substantiate it.

There have been news articles about governments employing this practice [0], so it is not much of a stretch to imagine corporations doing it.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-23695896

Try being negative about Amazon (not even AWS) I noticed that’s actually pretty hard.

That’s why it’s so effective. If they do it right you never will.

Eh, the article is about threats to the web as an information resource not controlled by one company. I don't think it's a distraction to put it in context.

Although I guess it becomes one when that becomes like the bulk of what HN viewers see in the first few screens of comments. I guess it could be argued we should have more discipline in HN comments because of the affordances. But that applies to replies to the comment turning it into a big thread of different opinions too, if you just left it alone/non-controversial, it wouldn't do that.

I actually posted a very similar comment before I saw yours. I totally agree that there's always this sort of redirection going on whenever there's something critical of Google here. And there's so much about Google I like. I just wish we could have more discussion about the original topic.

I respectfully disagree. The entire point of having a comments section on HN is so that the breadth of conversation can be expanded to encompass more than what just the article linked alone can provide.

As a result the same reportoire of stamped complaints is repeated over and over. This is a well-noted problem of HN comments section and treating this as a feature doesn't bode well.

I don't take the OP to be distracting or unnecessary in any way - in fact, I find it highly insightful.

The OP - perhaps without realizing it explicitly - makes an important distinction between the kinds of information-sharing systems that are in place on the modern web. Borrowing from Marshall McLuhan's distinctions between oral and literate cultures [0] we can see that Google and Facebook have a similar relationship. Both engage our hunter-gatherer mindsets in novel ways, but only one clearly does so with utility.

Google's usefulness as a search engine provider is in how it provides relevant information to users who are querying for something specific. Google search users are not sitting and waiting - they're searching and exploring. Google, therefore, plays to our hunter-gatherer mindset by directly aiding us in our searches.

Facebook's usefulness as a social network is in its ability to facilitate individual communications within a vast, centralized ecosystem. Users of Facebook are often searching for something - connections, information, relationships, etc., - but the way it engages its users' hunter-gatherer mindsets is very different. Instead of delivering targeted answers relevant to queries, Facebook forces its users to search through seemingly endless threads of often low-quality conversations, not really doing much of anything to aid in the search. Its users are simply sitting and waiting for the correct information to scroll into view. The search function on Facebook is not like Google's - it doesn't look for information, it simply takes you to a new part of the social square to which you want to go. Facebook, in essence, attaches a hunter-gatherer mindset to the very antithetical gossip found in the social square.

IMO, it is perfectly fine to have this conversation right here. Facebook has added a new dimension to the modern web: the expectation for there to be a well-regulated, always-available social square online. If the outcome of Google's actions are as inevitable as the article states, it would be proper to discuss where Facebook's unique "contributions" to the web fit into this article's analysis.

[0] https://youtu.be/ULI3x8WIxus?t=165

It's easy enough to close the thread and skip to the content you're looking for. At least that approach works for me.

Agreed. Breadth of discussion is important, but engaging in whataboutism and not being able to define a target is a great way to never change anything.

Stop gatekeeping.

This same thing happened on the last thread about Google.

Discourse is full of distractions and side topics and healthy diversions, thats what makes it interesting.

Not everything has to be perfectly efficient like a well run board meeting complete with agenda and minutes taken.

I'm all for a healthy avoidance of bikeshedding and derailment but this isn't a derailment. This is a tangential anecdote entirely valid to bring to the table as it gives insight into what can happen if google continues down this path.

We don't need to postulate what might happen with Google, we can look at Facebook and say, hey, you know what, these same things are going to happen here, let me tell you how that worked out.

If you can't manage to figure out how to bring this conversation back to google without locking the gate on natural discourse that's on you. Not us. Not ap.

Stop gatekeeping.

Calling a request to focus on the substance of the article instead of related issues elsewhere seems a far cry from gatekeeping. Especially given there's no enforcement behind the request.

That's not what gatekeeping means. Also, it is derailment, it's the definition of what-about-ism, In a discussion about Google dominating the web a "what about Facebook's walled garden" is a completely different issue.

Also, what does this have to do with bikeshedding? Both Facebook AND Google are serious issues.

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